From Tragedy To Good: Loss Of Brother, Son Turns Couple Toward Helping Others

By JEFF BENEDICT

Jun 12, 2016 | 7:00 AM

Icy and Scott Frantz have been coping with their own personal tragedies by volunteering with children with cancer and other illnesses. (Brad Horrigan / Hartford Courant)

Scott Frantz seldom played with toys when he was a boy. He was too busy learning to sail and fly. His father, Lee, owned both a marina on Long Island Sound and the Dutch airline Transavia, which had a satellite headquarters in nearby New York City. Scott often tagged along with his father at the shipyard and spent his summers boat racing and sailing in nearby coves, but his first

This is an excerpt from Jeff Benedict's new book, "Make a Choice." It is taken from the chapter, "Choose To Serve Others," about state Sen. Scott Frantz and his wife, Icy.

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love was aviation. He took his first flight before kindergarten, and his father let him take the controls of a plane when he was 11. Scott dreamed of becoming a pilot.

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Scott's older brother, Ted, and Scott's twin brother, Chris, had the same dream. Much of it had to do with their upbringing. The Frantz boys grew up in Greenwich. Their coastal home overlooked a tiny six-acre island that served as a year-round playground for the boys. ...

Scott's childhood seemed idyllic. His father took him sailing and flying. His mother encouraged him to dream big, and she taught him the value of education. He attended a private grammar school and a boarding school before going off to Princeton. At 22 he had a degree and his pilot's license. By the spring of 1986, he was finishing up his MBA at Dartmouth. Then everything changed.

May 23, 1986, began as the perfect day — blue sky, warm temperatures, sunny. Scott was on Nantucket for a weekend getaway before his final exams. That afternoon, his twin brother, Chris, and a couple of friends were supposed to arrive in Nantucket for a fishing trip. Chris, a commercial helicopter pilot, was transporting his friends in his helicopter, a Bell 206 JetRanger. They planned to depart from a hangar in Stamford. But by sundown there was no sign of them. ...

By the next day, Scott and his family couldn't help but think the worst. A Federal Aviation Administration computer radar printout showed an image that resembled a helicopter dropping off the screen near Westerly, R.I. It was looking more and more like Chris had crashed. Scott's parents couldn't bear the thought.

Neither could Scott. He dropped everything and focused all his energy on finding his brother. The Massachusetts Civil Air Patrol and U.S. Coast Guard searched a 6,000-square-mile area from the Connecticut coastline to just south of Cape Cod. ...

Then, in mid-June, some fishermen off Martha's Vineyard found large fragments of blue-and-white fiberglass. One of the pieces had a serial number. It matched the number on the missing helicopter. For the next month oceanographers combed the area with military-grade sonar equipment. They turned up many more pieces of the helicopter. Then they found the bodies. ...

Scott laid his brother to rest near his home on a spit of land that jutted out into Long Island Sound. Scott's mother never recovered from the loss. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1988 and died just months later.

Within two and a half years, Scott had lost both his brother and his mother. He dealt with the loss by working 15-hour days, six days a week at a Wall Street firm doing mergers and acquisitions. He kept so busy he didn't have time to deal with his emotions. The money poured in, but he felt empty inside. On Christmas Eve in 1988, he was sitting at his desk at Bankers Trust, working on another deal, when he started to wonder, What am I doing here? I should be helping the hungry or the homeless. There is so much more to life. ...

That night he pledged to leave Wall Street within three months.

He was gone in two. Early in 1989 he started his own investment firm not far from his childhood home in Greenwich. As a tribute to his younger brother, he helped establish a teen center in town, one of Chris' early ambitions. He also volunteered on numerous AmeriCares missions, making airlifts to Bosnia and Chechnya. But the best thing that happened to him was falling in love with Allison Hanley.

Like Scott, Allison had grown up in Greenwich and attended private schools, including an Episcopalian boarding school in New Hampshire. After college she had returned to Greenwich to work with Freedom Institute and Greenwich Academy as a drug-and-alcohol-prevention educator. Her nickname was Icy, but she was warm, down-to-earth, compassionate and adventurous. Scott was smitten.

Scott and Icy married at Christ Church in Greenwich on Dec. 18, 1993. He was 33. She was 28. By 2000 they had three boys: a 4-year-old and a set of 3-year-old twins. They settled next to Scott's childhood home on the six-acre island. ... His three sons were growing up the way Scott and his brothers had, around sailboats and airplanes. Things seemed pretty idyllic. Icy was even pregnant again and expecting another son.

But in her eighth month of pregnancy, an ultrasound revealed that the baby wasn't moving as it should. Doctors induced labor, and Icy gave birth on Sept. 28, 2000. They named the baby William, but they called him by his middle name — Sargeant, after the name of the second highest mountain in Maine's Acadia National Park.

Right away Icy knew something was different about Sargeant. For one thing, he never cried, not even when the nurse pricked his finger for a blood test. He didn't eat as much as her first three babies had, plus he slept constantly. ...

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Concerned, they brought him to Greenwich Hospital. Blood samples were taken. Tests were conducted. Specialists were brought in. Ultimately Scott and Icy were told that their infant son was suffering from a mitochondrial disease. ...

The doctors did their best to couch it, but there was no cure for most mitochondrial diseases.

For Scott, it was like hearing that his brother's helicopter had disappeared off the coast of Rhode Island all over again. Only this was harder. Sargeant was only two months old. His life had barely begun.

By Sargeant's first birthday, Icy realized his future was in God's hands. She prayed for a miracle that he'd get better, and then she dedicated every day to making Sargeant as comfortable as possible.

Scott prayed too, but he figured he wasn't going to get the outcome he wanted. "Losing my brother gave me the experience to know that I could survive losing a child," Scott said. "That being said, I still couldn't believe I was going through what I was going through. But I knew we could get through it." ...

All Icy wanted was for Sargeant to come home for Christmas. Instead, Icy's mother spent Christmas morning in the ICU with Sargeant so Icy and Scott could remain at home with the other children. ...

A bird made a nest in the Christmas wreath on Scott and Icy's front door, so they decided to leave the wreath up well past the holidays. They even put up a sign telling people to use another entrance. In the spring the bird laid four eggs. The first three hatched. The fourth didn't. Icy considered it more than coincidence. It felt like God was trying to tell her something.

Right around the time the baby birds left the nest, Sargeant passed away. It was April 2002. He was 18 months old. Scott and Icy buried him on the grounds of their church in Greenwich. Scott had Chris' grave moved next to Sargeant's. "I wanted them to be together," Scott said. ...

"What happens to us when we die?" It was just one of the questions Sargeant's brother asked shortly after he passed away. There were others:

The queries prompted Icy to do something she hadn't considered — write a children's book that answered those questions. The title came to her right away — "Sargeant's Heaven" — but figuring out what to say was another matter. Plus, she was raising three boys. Nevertheless, she started plugging away. A month turned into a year, and before she knew it, she had worked on the idea on and off for three years. ...

On March 25, 2006, Icy gave birth to a baby girl. They named her Brady. When Sargeant was born, he hadn't resembled any of his older brothers. But Brady looked an awful lot like Sargeant.

"I feel he was part of choosing her," Icy said. "I can picture Sargeant saying, 'You are going to go down there, and you are going to bring some humor into the family.'"

After Brady was born, Icy determined to finish "Sargeant's Heaven." Once she had the words down, she needed an illustrator and turned to friend Nina Weld, a local artist in Greenwich. ...

"Sargeant's Heaven" was self-published in 2007. Brian Williams featured it on NBC Nightly News, prompting over three thousand people to order copies. Icy wrote notes to everyone who purchased the book within the first six months of the on-sale date.

All proceeds were donated to organizations that help families in crisis. ...

Scott looks at God with gratitude rather than resentment. "What a privilege to be put here on the earth," he said. "God puts our soul on the earth and gives us a lot of leeway to mess things up, to get into trouble, to be lucky and unlucky, to experience joy and sorrow. The world wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it was otherwise."

Icy still tears up on occasion when she talks about Sargeant. But thinking about him usually puts a smile on her face. "You look at things the way you want," Icy said. "We choose to see him in a better place. But what amazes me as I look at the way people handle adversity is the amount of good that can come out of it. After we lost Sargeant, we wanted his life to have significance."

Jeff Benedict is a New York Times bestselling author of 14 books. His latest — "Make a Choice: When You're at the Intersection of Happiness and Despair" — was published this week by Shadow Mountain. See it at http://amzn.to/24GSKHG. Follow him on Twitter @authorjeff.